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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 17 Jun 2009
Somayeh Tohidloo, a female reformist blogger was arrested. As protest against Iranian presidential election grows, Iranian authorities arrested several political activists. Recently she and a couple of bloggers organized an internet interview with former president,Mohammad Khatami.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 17 Jun 2009
The technical issue of whether a given site returns a response for a given set of people captures only one small part of the larger problem of determining who controls the flows of information on the Internet and through media and social networks in general. A fuller approach to the problem is to think about those flows of information and how they are being filtered, by social and political as well as technical means. We should ask, for example, whether the information from the core group of proxy/Twitter users is filtering out to the wider Iranian and global communities, how it is flowing to and through those communities, and what effect the information is having as it filters out. The answers to those questions are impossible to determine in real time from the outside, given the chaos and confusion of the situation. As with the protests, time and perspective will tell.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 16 Jun 2009
The Times has overturned a court order which sought to protect the anonymity of a police blogger known as NightJack.
The blog, which has now been deleted, detailed the life and views of a serving police detective. Earlier this year it won an Orwell prize for political writing.
The blogger is Richard Horton a 45-year old detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary. When contacted by Murdoch's organ he sought an injunction to protect his privacy. But Justice Eady ruled he had no right to anonymity.
The judge said Horton could not expect to remain anonymous because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 16 Jun 2009
The Chinese government appears to have backed down in the face of public opposition to its plans for mandatory installation of censorship software on all new computers.
The Green Dam Youth Escort program, which restricts access to pornography and politically sensitive websites, was due to be compulsorily incorporated in the hard drives of all new machines sold after 1 July, but the state-run media announced today that it would instead be an optional package.
The softening of tone appears designed to head off a wave of criticism about the program, which has brought the government culture of information control into an unusually harsh domestic spotlight.
But it is unlikely to allay suspicions about the developer, Jinhui – a military-backed software firm – and about Green Dam, which tightens government control of the internet at the level of individual computers.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 16 Jun 2009
European privacy watchdogs have demanded that Google delete the original images behind its Street View service. The company has said it will comply with the demand in the "long term".
Street View has raised privacy concerns wherever it has launched but the UK's privacy regulator the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has said that Google's privacy protections are good enough to protect people's privacy.
A committee of all 27 EU member states' privacy regulators, the Article 29 Working Party, has asked Google to ensure, though, that original images are destroyed once they have been used to create blurred images that the public can see.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 16 Jun 2009
Under a new proposed Bill, the government is arming itself with the power to block websites without the right to be heard. Why is no one talking about it?
Last year, a few weeks after the Mumbai attacks in November, a Bill which had been sitting around in a Standing Committee since 2006 was hastily passed, without much debate in parliament. The Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008 seeks to give teeth to existing laws on information technology and cyberspace.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 16 Jun 2009
The authorities are only requiring PC makers to include the porn-filtering software, the Green Dam-Youth Escort program, in their products and not making it mandatory for consumers to use the filter, officials said Monday.
"The PC makers only need to save the setup files of the program on the hard drives of the computers, or provide CD-ROMs containing the program with their PC packages," said an official of the department of software service under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, who did not want to be named.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 15 Jun 2009
With the absence of text messaging and mobile services -- both were cut off across the country on and around election day and were still blocked on Sunday -- Twitter proved to be the most reliable communication technique between people inside Iran and millions of others on the outside thirsty for any update.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 15 Jun 2009
he federal government has distanced itself from a report that found internet censorship technology under consideration is seriously flawed.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the Internet Industry Association (IIA) report was commissioned and paid for by the former Howard government.
It was "not an analysis of the ALP's policy", he said.
The report concluded schemes to block inappropriate content - such as child pornography - could slow the internet and result in over- and under-blocking of material.
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By: Rebekah Heacock
Date: 15 Jun 2009
A Santa Barbara company said Friday that the Internet-filtering software that China has mandated for all new personal computers sold in that country contains stolen programming code.
Solid Oak Software Inc. said parts of its filtering program, which is designed for parents, can be found in the Green Dam Youth Escort filtering software that must be packaged with all computers sold in China starting next month.
